So this is my personal homenode - I've been meaning to write more here, but I haven't had much time to do so, but now I've got a little bit, so here's a blurb about me (which I know you're dying to read).

My name is Brian Arnold, I live in the lovely state of New Mexico, in the largest city, named Albuquerque (of Bugs Bunny fame). I was born here Feb 1, 1979.

I got into computers during elementary school, but just for games and whatnot - in middle school I took a Logo class, and was hooked on programming. That teacher also helped me get my own PC really cheap, and from that little Epson 8086 I cranked out some fun stuff in a variant of BASIC.

During HS I got a real PC (Pentium 100, a whole gig HD!), and also got into the web. I took the time to learn HTML 3.2 and went nuts with an ugly as hell site, joined linkexchange, had a few thousand hits.

After graduation, my freshman year of college brought two interesting things into my life - C++ and Perl. I took a C++ course and fell in love with programming - before, I was going to teach math, now I want to program in the "real world" for awhile, then come back and teach on a collegiate level.

I also acted as mentor for an HS group doing a ThinkQuest project, which was a blast. They chose to do a site on dreams, and part of it needed a CGI. I bought a Sams book (ducks 'n' hides) on Perl 5, and gave it to my friend in the project to read. He learned some perl, showed me the odd $_ stuff going on, and I just wrote it off at the time, cause I was so hyped on C++.

After a few years of college and lots of C++ and other programming classes (Scheme, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Java) I got a real-world job (without my degree sadly), and moved out to Northern Virginia, about 20 minutes west of DC - good stuff.

Worked out there for a year in a Network Operations Center, and eventually moved up to website management for the NOC. I then learned the lovely language Perl at that time, as it was best for the CGI's I was doing. I quickly fell in love. I soon discovered that a few semi-co-workers were here in the forms of MZSanford and wookie.

I then realized that I need my degree, so I quit and moved back to New Mexico. I've now finished my BS in CS, and am now working on master's degree, also in CS. I'm now a web developer by trade, but have to work in ASP unfortunately - full MS shop here. I still use Perl to help me though - perl -pi.bak -e 's/this/that/g' *.asp gets ran quite frequently. :D